On Daron Acemoglu

He is a one man institution

On Daron Acemoglu

[I (used to) sometimes get an envelope from the Nobel Committee for nominating a candidate for that year. In December 2018, I got one such letter. I nominated Daron. I thought he would get it that year itself (the actual prize is for the following year).]

I have a small paragraph above this sentence. It is not important for what follows. I used to use a trick to attract search engine’s attention to my webpages without revealing to the reader why my page was showing up when they searched for Salma Hayek together with Mexico! Back then, Google didn’t exist and Alta Vista was king.

[What appears below was written in 2019 - with some “year adjustments”]

Daron - the Magnificent

Consider Daron’s PhD thesis at the London School of Economics (LSE). It is a tome of 256 pages consisting of seven chapters (plus a chapter zero). His first chapter is longer than my entire PhD thesis. However, most PhD theses of that length (that of Daron) are mostly vapor. His thesis was tightly packed. 

I once asked his PhD supervisor Kevin Roberts (who used to be friends with my colleague called Ray Byron) about Daron's thesis. He said, "Had he written three of his weakest chapters as his thesis, it would have been categorized as better than the average thesis from the LSE." 

Chris Pissarides went one step further. He said, "His thesis is among the bests ever written - if not THE best at the LSE." 

Chris is no slouch. He got that little prize from Scandinavia.

For the next three decades, Daron wrote many papers in the top journals along with several influential books on the effects of institutions on the economy.

What does he write about? He takes on huge themes that seem intractable to economic analysis and shows how standard economic models can be tweaked to explain those phenomena. 

His coauthor Jim Robinson once complained, “He can write faster than I can digest his research.”

Jim is no slouch either. He shared the Nobel with Daron.

For a long time, there was a standard joke among economists that his extraordinary productivity can only be explained by the existence of an identical twin.

It is not all economics either. He forays into political science, sociology, finance, management and mathematics. One of (coauthored) papers is entitled, "Generalized Poincare-Hopf Theorem for Compact Nonsmooth Regions."

A coauthor of that paper is another Turk, Asuman Ozdaglar.

Did I mention that he is a Turk? To be precise, he is an Armenian Turk - a passionate one at that. One of his hobbies is to collect historical evidence of Turkish atrocities on the Armenians. 

Once I spent two hours at a conference lunch talking with him about that. Mostly, he was doing the talking and I was listening. When he was done, I realized I was the only one sitting at the table. Everybody else has gone to the post lunch session of the conference.

One of his coauthors is Asu Ozdaglar - another professor at MIT - in computer science. There is the ultimate power couple of MIT: Daron and Asu. 

Daron is an "Institute Professor" at MIT - most of such professors are already Nobel Laureates. He is arguably the highest paid professor there (in 2012) making over a million dollars a year. His wife reportedly makes another half a million. MIT outbid the other school across the Charles River betting that he would win a Nobel and that he would not leave MIT (I will leave you to guess which university). Their bet paid off.

Daron has already produced more PhD thesis students than any active economist today. And he is *still* producing them like there is no tomorrow. Soon, he will have one hundred of them - of great quality. That is how you start your own school of thought.

[I have a group of friends from the Indian Statistical Institute where I speculate about Nobel Prizes. In that group, I wrote in October 2019 on the eve of the prize announcement: “Whether Daron will win the Nobel this year, I do not know. But one of these days, he certainly will.” To be honest, I thought he *would* win it in 2019 but not just because I voted for him! That counts for nothing.]